Archives for category: Privacy and Privacy Rights
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When Arne Duncan Revised the FERPA Regulations Protecting Student Privacy

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2015 //
6

A reader of a post this morning about a letter from John Kline to Arne Duncan asked for more information about the Department of Education’s change of regulations governing FERPA (the Family and Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974).

In a post two years ago, I described the lawsuit filed by EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), which sought to block the changes in federal regulations in 2011 that loosened the protections of student privacy.

Here is an explanation of the lawsuit that appeared on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog.

The EPIC lawsuit was dismissed in 2013; the Court held that EPIC did not have standing to sue. Its ruling did not deal with the substantive claims.

Parent groups became concerned about FERPA when the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation funded the “Shared Learning Collaborative,” which was renamed inBloom. The plan was to aggregate personally identifiable student data from state data warehouses, store them in a cloud, and make them available for use by others. Whether those others included vendors, researchers, or commercial enterprises is not sure, but parents vehemently opposed the entire plan. The software was developed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation (part of Joel Klein’s Amplify division) and the data would be stored in a “cloud” managed by amazon. Parent groups, fearful that their child’s personal data would be mined, testified against the data-sharing agreements in every state and district that agreed to join inBloom, and the effort collapsed. The last state to withdraw was New York, because Commissioner John King supported inBloom. The legislature compelled the state’s withdrawal. When there were no states or districts willing to share student data, inBloom had no reason to exist.

The organization to fight inBloom was led by Leonie Haimson of New York and Rachel Strickland of Colorado, who formed the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. See here and here and here.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Parent Groups, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students

Letter from John Kline to Arne Duncan Surfaces, Warning About Student Privacy [LINK ADDED!]

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2015 //
17

One of the goals of Race to the Top was to create a national student data base, one collected from every state. Creating such a data base was one of the conditions of eligibility for Race to the Top. One of the companies formed to mine the data was created by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation and called inBloom. InBloom intended to use software created by Wireless Generation (part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, owned by Rupert Murdoch) to aggregate this personally identifiable information and put it into the “cloud,” that place in cyberspace where all data lives forever. There would have been 400 data points for each student. Parents organized in states and districts to prevent this breach of their children’s privacy, and state after state, district after district, dropped out because the plan was indefensible (New York state, led by John King, was the last to drop out, and then only because the Legislature commanded him to do so).

Now a letter has become public, from John Kline to Arne Duncan, warning Duncan about the dangers of creating a national data base of student information.

There is a federal law called FERPA that is supposed to protect the privacy of individual students, but Duncan changed the regulations to make data mining possible.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Peter Greene: Do Students Really Need Data-Packs to Follow Them Everywhere?

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2015 //
31

Peter Greene notes that the corporate reformers are still pressing for more data on each student. There can never be enough data. When there is more than enough, then you have Big Data, where government and corporations can analyze mega-trends. But reformers don’t say that this is what they want; they insist that this data is what parents want and need, even if they don’t say so themselves.

He writes:

Over at Getting Smart, a website devoted to selling educational product, guest writer Aimee Rogstad Guidera makes her case for more data collection for each student– because it’s what parents want.

“Parents are eager for information about their child’s education. As a mom, I want to know if my daughter is struggling in math before she comes home in tears. I need information to support my child’s learning at home, and to support my child and her teacher in making the best decisions for her learning in the classroom.”

Maybe I just don’t get it, but I’m inclined to think that if you didn’t know your child was having trouble in math before the coming-home-in-tears part, you’re just not paying attention. I have heard this pitch enough times to make me occasionally wonder if there is, in fact, some place where teachers keep every scrap of information carefully hoarded, students never speak to their parents about school, parents never ask about school, and all parent requests for conferences and information are denied by all school personnel. Maybe there is some place where parents are so deeply clueless and helpless that they have no idea how their students are doing.
Or maybe Guidera is the CEO and President of the Data Quality Campaign, a group interested in student data and funded by the Gates Foundation, the Waltons, the Dells, and the Ford Foundation. They do have some rules about how such data should be kept in a safe lockbox, but they are clearly Big Data fans.

Guidera is advocating for student data backpacks– little (or not so little) bundles of data that just follow students around, providing parents with all sorts of longitudinal data (because, again, parents don’t know much about their own children).

Greene has some advice for parents who want more information about how their child is doing: pick up the phone and call the teacher.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students

EXCLUSIVE: Inside the Pearson Global Threat Machine

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2015 //
33

I received an email from a person in a foreign country; I am not free to identify the name of the informant or the country as I do not want the informant to be fired. I have deleted the names of the two university students who were investigated. Both have fewer than 100 twitter followers. Frankly, I find this level of scrutiny of individuals by a huge multinational corporation to be shocking.

The message reads as follows:

Diane I work for a company in XXXX that Pearson has retained to spy on students.

Find attached the text of the kind of surveillance in place – It’s run at Pearson by some guy called Marc Lueck – he’s an American living in the UK. He runs the Pearson threat team and that’s how he views these kids, as threats. He wants to spend more and more money monitoring the internet and has retained a number of comapnies around the world. We call him the childcatcher. You can see from the text that Pearson and this Marc guy are expending real money and resources to make sure no stones are unconvered. I have kids and what these guys are doing is wrong – I want to track down hackers and criminals not spy on kids. We state in the report that these kids pose no threat to Pearson but Pearson wants us to keep monitoring them.

I could lose my job for this, but I thought you should know.

[NOTE: AT THE ADVICE OF READER FLERP!, I REMOVED THE REPORT TO PEARSON. THERE WERE ITEMS IN THE REPORT THAT WOULD HAVE ALLOWED A SNOOP TO TRACK DOWN THE PARTIES INVOLVED. I DON’T WANT TO GET THEM IN TROUBLE. WE LEARNED LAST SPRING THAT PEARSON HAS AN OPERATION TO WATCH FACEBOOK, TWITTER, AND OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA SITES FOR ANY MENTION OF THEIR TESTS OR TEST ITEMS. SO, MAYBE IT IS NO SURPRISE TO LEARN THAT THIS IS A BIG DEAL FOR THE TESTING CORPORATIONS.]

Categories Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students

A Comment on the Rafe Esquith Situation

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2015 //
48

A reader in Los Angeles sent this reflection on LAUSD’s demand for Rafe Esquith’s personal financial history.

“This whole thing getting really wacko.

“Can an employee—under threat of being fired—be compelled by his employer to turn over private
information such as this—i.e. 15 years of tax returns, loan documents, monthly bank statements?

“I mean, why stop there? Why not demand all your private diaries or journals? All your computers with all the personal data, internet activity, emails etc.? How about your
medical records? Your private written correspondence?

“This is especially ridiculous in this case, as the employer refuses to divulge the foundation for such a demand, or the suspicions, or the
testimony/evidence that warrant this demand to give up one’s privacy?

“And again, THESE INVESTIGATORS ARE NOT AGENTS OF ACTUAL LAW ENFORCEMENT!!! They’re
retired LAPD detectives working as bureaucrats in a public school district!!! WHO THE HELL DO THESE GUYS THINK THEY ARE???!!!

“In your own life, if a past employer — New York University? or whomever? — sicced two investigatorson you who demanded this of you, what
would you have done?

“I would have been left utterly speechless. Could this even be possible in the U.S.?

“Whatever happened to the Constitutional right to privacy?

“This is as at least as bad as quid-pro-quo sexual harassment—i.e. “have sex with me or you’re fired”—in its enabling of the employer to use the threat of losing one’s job, livelihood, income, etc. as a way to take away one’s basic civil liberties and innate human dignity.

“This is way bigger than Rafe’s case.”

Categories Los Angeles, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Teachers

Pennsylvania Test Scores Plummet

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2015 //
26

Pennsylvania’s test scores dropped again. Rigor!

The curriculum is developmentally inappropriate, the tests are two grade levels above grade level. Class sizes are growing because of budget cuts. Money has been sucked out of public schools to fund privately managed charters.

Rigor was designed to fail more students and pave the way for privatization. It is working.

Categories Common Core, Pennsylvania, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Standardized Testing

Who Cares About Privacy? Not the US DOE. Not Bill Gates.

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2015 //
9

Laura Chapman read this post about proposed legislation to allow massive collection of college student data, and she did some research. This is what she found:

The proposed law to monetize the worth of a degree certainly reflects the values of Bill Gates and his “Data Quality Campaign,” and his desire to stack rank almost anything he can, preferably with publication in U.S. News and World report. I recall vividly that he once said he wanted kids to “get a college degree that is worth something,” meaning worth money.

In prior posts I have noted that, beginning in 2005, Gates funded the Data Quality Campaign” (Orwellian name), as if in tandem and designed to complement USDE funds for the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) program.

The Teacher-Student Data Link system (TSDL) system envisioned by Gates is in place as the records system for local to state reporting to USDE. In Ohio that system actually structures the categories for teacher evaluation. So, InBloom may be gone but the Gates vision has prevailed and, from the get go, his campaign was intended to “keep current and longitudinal data on the performance of teachers and individual students, as well as schools, districts, states, and educators ranging from principals to higher education faculty.

Moreover, as articulated in the Data Quality Campaign, one of the main purposes of the data gathering was to determine the “best value” investments to make in education and to monitor improvements in outcomes, taking into account as many demographic factors as possible, including health records for preschoolers. Access to such records has been made easier by USDE’s poking holes in the FERPA law that offered a bit of protection for the use of student data.

Now this proposed legislation is about higher education. Suppose it passes. Whether the oversight is done by a special agency or USDE is not clear. But if USDE has oversight of the law and the program, then all of the data management and cost/benefit on programs and degrees are likely to be outsourced to a private company, just as USDE’s data management is outsourced now. I discovered this by snooping around at the USDE website. In the process I discovered that USDE has two key people as privacy officers. One is Kathleen Styles, USDE’s first “Chief Privacy Officer”—Email: kathleen.styles@ed.gov. The second is Michael Hawes, who is her advisor and the person who oversees USDE’s extremely important “Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC).” Email: michael.hawes@ed.gov

Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) is supposed to be a “one-stop” resource for learning about “data privacy, confidentiality, and security practices related to student-level longitudinal data systems and other uses of student data.” PTAC provides timely information and updated guidance on privacy, confidentiality, and security practices through a variety of resources, including training materials and opportunities to receive direct assistance with privacy, security, and confidentiality of student data systems.” This technical assistance is targeted to meet the needs of state and local education agencies and…… institutions of higher education.

PTAC is really at the center of everything–The contractor for PTAC is responsible for working under “the guidance of the Chief Privacy Officer and in close collaboration with the FERPA Working Group,” which consists of representatives of the Office of Management, the Family Policy Compliance Office, and the Office of General Counsel. PTAC also “regularly consults” with the USDE’s Privacy Advisory Committee, whose members include Chief Statistician of National Center of Education Statistics, the program officer of the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS), and representatives from the office of Federal Student Aid, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (among others).

The for-profit company managing and warehousing USDE data and at the center of all of the work of all of these agencies is Applied Engineering Management Corporation (AEM). Since 2010, (AEM) appears to have been awarded about $12 million to set up the resources at PTAC.

AEM also has contracts with OTHER federal, state, and local governments and agencies.. Their work for USDE includes management of data gathering required to support the “No Child Left Behind” legislation, including the 180 data descriptions for EdFacts. EdFacts is the destination for all of those disaggregated test scores, and other data that law requires. AEM can do heavy-duty data warehousing.

AEM has also operated the National Student Loan Data System receiving data from every college, university, and agency that participates in Title IV loan guarantees and related programs. That work gives AEM a leg up as a possible contractor for more work under the proposed legislation.

AEM’s website also says it helps “educators in developing high quality longitudinal P-20 data warehouses and business intelligence solutions that stand the test of time and enable data-driven decision making.”

AEM–-the go-to corporation for USDE’s data management and privacy–-has managed to suppress its identity as the conduit for USDE’s “big data” projects and USDE’s (pitiful) guidance to state and local agencies on privacy. Use this phrase to get to the PTAC resources “Privacy Technical Assistance Center.”

Categories Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Privacy and Privacy Rights, U.S. Department of Education

1984 Arrives Thirty Years Late: Say Goodby to Privacy Forever if This Bill Passes

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2015 //
26

Legislation called “The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act” has been introduced in both houses of Congress. Nice name, no? Don’t you think you should have “the right to know before you go” to a college or university?

 

What it really means is that the federal government will:

 

authorize the creation of a federal database of all college students, complete with their personally identifiable information, tracking them through college and into the workforce, including their earnings, Social Security numbers, and more. The ostensible purpose of the bill? To provide better consumer information to parents and students so they can make “smart higher education investments.”

 

Big Data, the answer to all problems. All you need do is surrender your privacy and become someone’s data point, perhaps the point of sales.

 

Barmak Nassirian, writing on the blog of Studentprivacymatters, warns about the dangers this legislation poses. He wrote originally in response to an article endorsing the legislation by researchers at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who viewed the invasion of personal privacy as less significant than the need for consumer information about one’s choice of a college or university:

 

First, let’s be clear that the data in question would be personally identifiable information of every student (regardless of whether they seek or obtain any benefits from the government), that these data would be collected without the individual’s consent or knowledge, that each individual’s educational data would be linked to income data collected for unrelated purposes, and that the highly personal information residing for the first time in the same data-system would be tracked and updated over time.

 

Second, the open-ended justification for the collection and maintenance of the data (“better consumer information”) strongly suggests that the data systems in question would have very long, if not permanent, record-retention policies. They, in other words, would effectively become life-long dossiers on individuals.

 

Third, the amorphous rationale for matching collegiate and employment data would predictably spread and justify the concatenation of other “related” data into individuals’ longitudinal records. The giant sucking sound we would hear could be the sound of personally identifiable data from individuals’ K12, juvenile justice, military service, incarceration, and health records being pulled into their national dossiers.

 

Fourth, the lack of explicit intentionality as to the compelling governmental interest that would justify such a surveillance system is an open invitation for mission creep. The availability of a dataset as rich as even the most basic version of the system in question would quickly turn it into the go-to data mart for other federal and state agencies, and result in currently unthinkable uses that would never have been authorized if proposed as allowable disclosures in the first place.

 

This is a bill that conservatives and liberals should be fighting against. Imagine if such a data-set existed; how long would it be before the data were hacked, for fun and profit, exposing personally identifiable information about students who had never given their consent? Didn’t the government recently become aware of a massive hack of its personnel records?

 

 

According to the New York Times:

 

For more than five years, American intelligence agencies followed several groups of Chinese hackers who were systematically draining information from defense contractors, energy firms and electronics makers, their targets shifting to fit Beijing’s latest economic priorities.

 

But last summer, officials lost the trail as some of the hackers changed focus again, burrowing deep into United States government computer systems that contain vast troves of personnel data, according to American officials briefed on a federal investigation into the attack and private security experts.

 

Undetected for nearly a year, the Chinese intruders executed a sophisticated attack that gave them “administrator privileges” into the computer networks at the Office of Personnel Management, mimicking the credentials of people who run the agency’s systems, two senior administration officials said. The hackers began siphoning out a rush of data after constructing what amounted to an electronic pipeline that led back to China, investigators told Congress last week in classified briefings.

 

How long will a treasure trove of personally identifiable student data remain confidential?

 

If this bill passes, farewell to privacy.

 

 

Categories Data and Data Mining, Higher Education, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Michael Barber on the Joy of Data

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2015 //
15

Last weekend I attended a joyous family wedding and thus was preoccupied and failed to notice one of the seminal moments in reformer history. This was Michael Barber’s speech on “Joy and Data.” Barber is the chief education adviser to Pearson, and he gave this speech in Australia, hoping to debunk the claim that an undue emphasis on data takes away the joy of learning. Barber’s goal was to demonstrate that joy and data go together like a horse and carriage.

Valerie Strauss wrote about Barber’s speech here, and Peter Greene did his usual sharp vivisection of Barber’s ideology here. Strauss collects some of the witty Twitter responses to Barber’s speech; Greene contrasts it with Pearson’s activities and Barber’s publications.

Strauss summarizes:

“In his speech, Barber argues that the pursuit of data has wrongly been accused of sucking the creativity out of learning but that in his world view, data and joy are the two elements that will together improve learning systems around the world in the 21st Century.”

Greene says that Barber’s speech was a celebration of Oxymoron Day. He summarizes Barber’s Big Speech:

“The future of education will be more joyful with the embrace of data. Also, don’t get things wrong– the data does not undermine creativity and inspiration, nor does it tell us what to do, nor does it replace professional judgment. And I don’t even know how to link to all the places where Pearson has contradicted all of this. I would be further ahead to find links to Jeb Bush condemning charter schools and Common Core….

“If we lump all of Pearson’s visionary writing together, the picture that emerges is a Brave New World in which every single student’s action is tagged, collected, and run through a computer program that spits out an exact picture of the student’s intellectual, emotional and social development as well as specific instructions on exactly what the teacher (and, in this Brave New World, we’re using that term pretty loosely) should do next with/for/to the student to achieve the results desired by our data overlords.”

Greene is struck by the scary thought that Barber actually believes what he is saying; arguing with him would be like debating a religious fanatic.

As I read this contemplation of joy and data, I found myself wondering whether Mike Barber might be a cyborg. So I started reading about cyborgs and became persuaded that thos is not the right term to describe a man who confuses quantification with emotion. The right word seems to be android.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Joy, Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Haimson and Stickland: Who Is Mining Your Child’s Data?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2015 //
5

Leonie Haimson and Rachel Stickland are warriors for student privacy. Together, they mobilized parents in state after state to oppose inBloom, the massive data-mining project funded by the Gates and Carnegie Corporations for $100 million with software developed by Rupert Murdoch’s education division; thanks to their efforts, inBloom folded.

But the data mining hasn’t stopped. Vendors are eager to get your child’s name, address, grades, records, interests, and hundreds of other personally identifiable bits of data. We thought our children’s data was confidential and protected by federal law, but as Haimson and Stickland explain in this article, this is no longer the case because the U.S. DOE revised regulations in 2008 and 2011 to make data mining possible without parental consent.

Now Congress is revising the privacy law, but it is inadequate to protect children’s privacy. Haimson and Stickland explain what needs to be done to stop the commercial invasion of children’s privacy.

Categories Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students
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